Archive for September, 2012

The Politically Powerful Rule…
Stand & Serve No More!

Clean Energy is the enemy of government mandated stupidity that transfers money from the poor to the politically powerful monopolies and cartels. Here is one more example of corruption by the politically powerful to generate crony capitalism profits.

“The real problem,” he goes on, “is that the corn market is fundamentally misshaped by government interventions that have made a mess of this and many more markets. The distortions are never contained, but spread and spread.

“Corn is the single most important commodity for retail food,” Richard Volpe, an economist for the USDA told the Los Angeles Times. “Corn is either directly or indirectly in about three-quarters of all food consumers buy.

Unfortunately, they’re both right. Corn is now in three out of four food products, fueling obesity’s 300% jump since 1970 by jacking up Americans on high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, each year we make ethanol out of enough corn to fatten up more than 400 million more people for an entire year.

All the while, by one estimate, ethanol consumes six times more energy than it produces. It clogs up your gas tank with continued use. And if greenhouse gases are a concern for you, ethanol generates twice the emissions of plain ol’ gasoline.

The question: Why is corn being used as fuel if it’s so inefficient, costly and bad for the environment? “The answer is a Soviet-like, stupid-like government mandate,” Jeffrey responds, clearly bitter about the issue.

“It is actually relatively new,” Jeffrey explains. “It came about in 2005 and 2007. It mixes nearly all the gas we can buy with a sticky product now in rather short supply.

“Of all the government regulations I’ve looked at in detail over the last 10 years, the ethanol mandate is, by far, the worst. There are no grounds on which it is defensible,” Jeffrey concludes.

Radioactive Waste Disposal 1980

The politically powerful went forward with the construction of Nuclear Reactors without knowing what could be done for Radioactive Waste Disposal…

“Highly radioactive wastes are dangerous and deadly wherever they are, whether stored at reactor sites (indoors in pools or outdoors in dry casks); transported on the roads, rails, or waterways; or dumped on Native American lands out West.

“Highly radioactive wastes include solid irradiated nuclear fuel assemblies (called spent or used by the industry that creates them) and liquid high-level radioactive wastes resulting from the reprocessing (extraction of fissile plutonium and uranium) of solid irradiated fuel rods.

“The vast majority of highly radioactive wastes generated in the U.S. come from commercial nuclear power reactors.

“Irradiated nuclear fuel rods discharged from commercial nuclear power plants are highly radioactive, a million times more so than when they were first loaded into a reactor core as fresh fuel.

“If unshielded, irradiated nuclear fuel just removed from a reactor core could deliver a lethal dose of radiation to a person standing three feet away in just seconds. Even after decades of radioactive decay, a few minutes unshielded exposure could deliver a lethal dose.

“Certain radioactive elements (such as plutonium-239) in spent fuel will remain hazardous to humans and other living beings for hundreds of thousands of years. Other radioisotopes will remain hazardous for millions of years. Thus, these wastes must be shielded for centuries and isolated from the living environment for hundreds of millenia.

“For more on the problems of this waste disposal, go to the Radioactive Waste Project site of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service at http://www.nirs.org/radwaste/hlw/hlw.htm . This clip is from the 1980 Disney film, The Atom: A Closer Look, available at the Internet Archives,.”

From You Tube at: http://youtu.be/1na6gUUpwvU

Part of the thinking back then was that by the time Radioactive Waste became a problem, scientists would have provided a solution… And they were correct… But!

By that time Radioactive Waste Disposal had turned into Radioactive Waste Containment and is much too profitable for the Radioactive Waste Cartels to admit it could be disposed.

And the politicians wanted to keep Radioactive Waste available to make more weapons to kill people. The politicians also now had their own little bureaucratic empires created. Politicians never want to give up power by eliminating a problem they can micro-manage.